


(standing on the borderline) between two states

by Anonymous



Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [18]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Depression, Eating Disorders, Gen, Past Character Death, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:49:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22442071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Roman is dead.Remus refuses to become Thomas's only Creativity.
Relationships: Creativity | Roman "Princey" Sanders & Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders, Deceit Sanders & Thomas Sanders, Logic | Logan Sanders & Thomas Sanders
Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1453462
Comments: 13
Kudos: 42
Collections: anonymous





	(standing on the borderline) between two states

**Author's Note:**

> (dum. dum. dum) another one bites the dustor
> 
> this. was not meant to be this fluffy. is this fluffy? i don't know. It is Nearly Midnight and I Don't Understand My Life. basically, smol grown-up autism hyperfocused and ruined their routine
> 
> content warnings: suicide!!! a shitload of suicide discussion. good thing that this is all just externalised discussion of an internal dilemma, otherwise it would be fucking weird. a little bit of gore, because remus did not, until recently, have his own individual body. oooh, and eating disorders, and weight gain/loss discussion!!!

Remus won’t stop screaming for the foreseeable future. That’s not a fact that Logan is absolutely certain of, but that does not mean that it is wholly inaccurate. It is certainly worthy of note.

Logan sits on the end of Thomas’s bed, his upper body and neck turned to the left so that he can observe his Centre, who is experiencing the same strange, nostalgic grief as he had in the summertime. Lying in bed, wondering what went wrong.

This time, though, the cause isn’t much of a mystery. It’s fairly simple, Logan thinks. He, Virgil, and Ethan were all summoned into the physical world the moment that Thomas understood that he was awake.

“Roman’s gone,” he’d told them.

Logan is ashamed to admit that he didn’t believe Thomas, initially, even as Ethan vouched for his honesty. Roman is – _was_ ; Roman is now a Side who only exists in the past tense – Creativity. He couldn’t be _gone_ , just like that. It wasn’t logical.

As he’d muttered those words, pacing at the foot of Thomas’s bed, Ethan had slowly shaken his head. He held his hands, clasped together with interlinked fingers, in front of his chest, as if he was praying to the silent memory of a god.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Logan had uttered, tearing his eyes away from Ethan’s face, and how he could only furrow one eyebrow in an expression of concern because half of his face was snake scales.

Virgil was biting down on the heel of his palm. His other hand plucked at hairs from his scalp, pulling them out, one by one.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Logan had uttered, feeling the falsehood course through his body like cold bile, even as he spoke. “How can he be there one day, and then be gone?”

“I dreamed of him,” Thomas had explained. His voice was muffled, so it took a moment for Logan to understand what he’d said, and then another moment for him to realise that Thomas, too, was biting against his hand.

Logan had thrown an arm up, away from his body, then drawn it back to fold against his other arm, over his chest, in a self-embrace that didn’t do much to soothe him. “You’ve dreamed many things, Thomas! It doesn’t make them real!”

Thomas didn’t speak for a moment.

“We’re not real,” Virgil said, then.

“It was real as him,” Thomas said, so quickly that he couldn’t have processed what Virgil had said before him. “I forgave him, and he dissolved into us.”

Logan sat down on the bed in a heavy way that was more like falling. He would have replied to Thomas, but, before he could think of something he could say, Remus had clambered through the floor, and the bed, and the mattress and sheets and duvet, doing as much damage to those objects as a gentle breeze would.

Wildly, Remus was screaming, clawing with his left hand at a withered stub that split from his neck on the opposite side, where Roman used to be. His fingernails were covered in slick blood, as scarlet as a discarded prince’s sash, and far more shiny.

“ _Where’s my brother?_ ” he had screamed in a hoarse voice that grated against Logan’s eardrums. He wasn’t sure if it was a complete figure of speech, or if there was a grain of truth to it. “ _Roman! Where is he?_ ”

* * *

And that, simply put, had happened.

Now, Remus screams, clambering around on the duvet, getting his legs tangled in it and still screaming.

“Where is he? _Where is he_?”

Thomas pulls his t-shirt down over his stomach, suddenly exposed to the cold. He clambers back as Logan stands up. None of them look away from Remus’s feral cries.

“He was right next to me! He’s part of me! _Where is he_?”

Logan sees, in his peripheral vision, a blur of black and purple, slinking over to Thomas. As it gets closer, Logan can tell that it’s Virgil’s hoodie, followed by Virgil, holding it out. He wraps it around Thomas’s shoulders, shifts in his own black sweatshirt, and remains, like a barrier between Remus, and Logan and the others.

“Re-” Thomas’s voice is a croak, one that Logan can only hear because the three of them – he and Thomas and Ethan – are huddled together like it will help.

Ethan shakes his head rapidly, with the little bits of fringe poking out of his beanie flapping with each movement. His breath hisses through his bared teeth as he stares at Thomas with wide eyes.

So, Ethan doesn’t want Thomas to do or anything to change the current status quo, which is now Remus, having torn off most of the skin of his extraneous neck stump, clawing at the rest of his right shoulder. There’s blood on Thomas’s bedsheets, and the wall, but mostly on Remus’s once-grey shirt.

As he turns, half-limping, his right arm swings out beside him. He makes no effort to move it. Of course he doesn’t, Logan realises. He’s been sharing a body with Roman for the past few months. He hasn’t had full control for so long; he’s possibly forgotten that he even _has_ a second arm to use.

Remus shows no signs of slowing down or growing silent. His volume fluctuates, yes, but it fluctuates between _taking a deep breath_ and _ear-splittingly loud_. The noises from his throat have the same ripping quality as the sound of tearing paper, but his mouth forms them into words occasionally.

“ _Roman! Roman!_ ”

They need a catalyst. Something needs to be done to change this, so that they aren’t all trapped in this state of fear for the foreseeable future.

Logan looks to Thomas and gives a sharp nod.

“ _Remus_!” Thomas screams.

Ah. That turned out to be louder than Logan had expected.

Remus’s current wordless scream cuts off immediately, with the suddenness of a record ripped from the phonograph. He seems to have gone limp.

Logan doesn’t think that anybody else in the room is breathing. He certainly isn’t.

Like a poorly-puppeteered marionette, Remus’s head jerks up. His wild eyes stare just to the left of Logan, at Thomas. Thomas, who stands steady, or steadied by Ethan, and looks straight back at Remus. He bites on his lip, but Logan has already seen how it trembles.

“ _Thomas_.”

Remus speaks hoarsely, but he speaks. He does not scream. He does not shout. He merely says.

“Remus, I’m sorry,” says Thomas, weakly.

Logan blinks.

Remus is scrambling over the bed, bloody and feral.

He blinks again.

Virgil is holding Remus back, both hands on both shoulders. Remus shows no sign of noticing. Instead, his hand, encrusted and slick with blood, reaches out to Thomas.

“Virgil,” Thomas murmurs, “stand down.”

With cautious slowness, Virgil releases Remus’s unmoving shoulders, and backs away for two small steps. His shoulders are still hunched with tension.

“Thomas,” Remus repeats. “Thomas. I woke up, and he was gone.”

Thomas nods tersely, and takes Remus’s hand, lowering it to a normal hand-holding level, or so Logan assumes.

“Same here,” he says.

Remus’s eyelashes flutter as he blinks rapidly. Nevertheless, a pink tear rolls down his cheek. “Why?”

Thomas shrugs.

Once more, Remus asks, in his broken voice, “Why?”

Thomas bites his lip, swallows, then speaks. “He didn’t want to, but he had to. He… He wasn’t Creativity, anymore.”

Remus’s eyes narrow. Is he meaning to threaten Thomas? A glance to Ethan and Virgil does not help Logan. He can’t understand either of their expressions.

“What else could he be, if not Creativity?” Logan knows that Remus’s smile is forced as he says that.

For a couple of seconds, Thomas seems to hesitate. He looks at the floor for a moment, before making eye contact with Remus once more.

“He’s… He was my hopes and dreams. My confidence, or my ego; however you want to put it. And, without… Without Patton-”Thomas’s voice cracks as he speaks that name. “Without Patton being there to support my short-term goals, and with him not being my emotional core… My heart wasn’t in anything,” says Thomas, his voice trembling. “I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted everything to stop.”

Remus’s lip quavers. He’s shaking his head a little. His hand is no longer being held by Thomas, but, rather, he is holding his own right hand, blemishing it in blood, and holding it against his cheek.

“I rotted him with my brain.” Remus doesn’t say that as much as he warbles it. His voice is too unstable to come out in any steadier way. “He was… We were the same head, and we got too mixed up, and I rotted him, didn’t I?”

“No.”

Ethan says that firmly, before Thomas can open his mouth to reply.

“Remus, you forget that I was there, after, and before. We all were,” says Ethan, patient and steady.

Virgil tugs at his sweatshirt. “He hadn’t been himself for a while, Dukey. It had nothing to do with you.”

“He was how he was supposed to be most when you were there, with him,” Thomas adds. “He was happy with you.”

Remus’s head makes a snapping sound, with how quickly he shakes it. It’s abrupt – left, right – and then Remus says, “He wasn’t happy.”

Thomas shrugs. “Well, I’m not much of an expert on _‘happy’_ , anymore. He was… Better. He was better with you.”

Baring his teeth in a sad smile, Remus replies, “But not enough to stay.”

For a long while, nobody speaks. The blood fades from the bedsheets and the walls, dissolving in a PowerPoint transition of red-turning-brown to magnolia. Thomas pulls on the strings of Virgil’s hoodie, which is still slung over his shoulders like a cape. Ethan scratches at his scaled cheek.

“I don’t want to live without Roman,” Remus tells them all, abruptly.

For an even longer while, nobody speaks.

Outside, behind the drawn curtains, the world continues. The world has always continued, and it always will. The likelihood of Thomas being born; being born and still being alive, even now is… It’s infinitesimal. The likelihood of Thomas changing the world is even smaller. He’s changed some people’s lives, and they will go on and change other people. Isn’t that enough?

* * *

Deceit has been Ethan since July. That’s half a year. Half a year spent, twisting and unmaking and recreating himself into something palatable. Ignoring every lie that could be told, unless it was necessary for survival, and carefully beckoning Thomas to the outside world, while Virgil screamed at them to hide and waste away into nothingness.

Figuratively, of course.

Ethan had never participated in a binge. When they were more regular, he had stopped eating entirely, but that didn’t help at all. Restricting one’s food intake, especially to that extent, could never be healthy.

Still, he experiences their effects. When he is stressed he, too, feels the urge to clear out half the kitchen cupboards and make his way through them in an attempt to escape from his current issues and find a different problem, instead. It’s an urge he’s never given into, but it’s there, all the same.

He hides his body away, now. Not that he didn’t before, but it feels worse, now that it isn’t a choice. Well, strictly speaking, it _is_ , but it’s not much of one. No matter how body-positive he tries to be, Thomas still suffers from negative self-image, and it only got worse as they inched further away from an average BMI. Out of sight, out of mind, and that goes for every Side, because they’re all identical. Mostly. Even Remus stopped stripping so much.

It’s not a fast thing, but they are losing weight, now. They probably won’t ever get back down to the point where Thomas was happily posting shirtless pictures of himself to Tumblr, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is Thomas’s happiness.

And he can’t be happy if he’s dead.

“I’m too tired for the courtroom,” Ethan sighs, “so we’re doing it like this. Everyone gives a reason for or against Thomas… _Committing suicide_.”

He drawls out those last couple of words in a tone that hopefully implies that he’s done with their shit, rather than being afraid.

“We’re going clockwise. Remus, you go first.”

Remus stands up, placing his hand in his back pocket and shifting his balance from one foot to the other. Blankly, he grins, “Thomas should die because Roman is dead, and I don’t want to live without him.”

He sits back down on the sofa, and, from the top of the corner seat, Virgil raises his hand a little.

“Thomas should… Thomas should k-” He cuts himself off and looks up at Ethan. “Do I have to say that part?”

“Yes,” Ethan affirms, with all of the authority he has. “How can you bring yourself to argue in favour of something you find unspeakable?”

Virgil closes his eyes, tightly enough that his whole face crinkles up. He flips his hood over his head and pulls on the drawstrings until they tauten. “I think that Thomas should kill himself, because Roman was Creativity, and now he’s gone. Thomas isn’t going to make anything to a high a standard as he used to. _Better to burn out than to fade away_ , or whatever. I don’t want us to be ashamed by the end of our career.”

Thomas stands, when Virgil is finished, and says, “I’ve got nothing. That’s why we’re doing this.”

Then he sits down again.

Succinct.

When Logan stands up, he’s wringing his hands together, and Ethan can see that his lip has gone cherry-red from worrying at it.

“I…” he begins. His eyes flicker around the room. “In the interests of… I’m…”

He sits back down abruptly.

“I’m remaining impartial.”

Ethan watches them all from where he stands in front of them. He glances at the coffee table, and sees the camera, and a kitchen knife the length of his hand. Behind him, a whiteboard writes out simplified versions of the reasons given in red ink. So far, the left column has two reasons, and the right has none.

“Thomas Sanders should remain alive, because we’ve put in too much effort to give up, now,” says Ethan, and immediately regrets it. _That’s_ his best argument? _That’s_ what he’s spoken into being, in sky-blue ink? He might as well just slit Thomas’s neck with his own two hands. And that knife.

Again, Remus speaks, “Thomas should die because I’m not ready to be Creativity.”

Virgil says, “Thomas should commit suicide, because it’s too late to find a different career, and it’s not like we can go back to environmental sciences.”

“I mean, I could, but…” Thomas shakes his head. “No. I wouldn’t be able to focus on studying, and I’ll still feel like a failure.”

Logan murmurs, slowly, “Thomas should stay alive, because we only get one chance at life.”

“Thomas should remain alive, because these issues are temporary. We should not waste possible decades of life merely because we are currently experiencing health problems,” Ethan announces.

Okay, that sounds even worse, like those anti-suicide PSAs that Ethan laughs at when he sees on TV.

Virgil snorts, and sarcastically says, “Nice way of putting it.”

Remus claps, saying, “Thomas should die because it could be fun. Come on, it’s a new experience!”

“Thomas should stay alive, because dying would make his family sad,” Virgil mutters to his knees, then looks at Thomas. “What would Joan do without us?”

With a huff of air that might pass as a laugh in other circumstances, Thomas replies, “Something better, probably.”

Virgil nods hesitantly, echoing, “Probably.”

When it’s Logan’s turn, he keeps his eyes shut as he stands and speaks.

“There are a multitude of possibilities as to what the future might hold. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. Almost all of them are neutral.” He pauses. “We cannot change careers at this point. The stresses of retraining and the anxieties that come from being made more aware as to how terribly humanity is treating the world will worsen Thomas’s mental health. It’s just a slower path to the same ending, of Thomas committing suicide. Perhaps it is… _Better_ , if it takes less time. We won’t drag anyone else further down.”

Ethan keeps his voice as steady as he can, and says something like, “Logan, can you please confirm the side of your argument?”

“Yes,” says Logan, finally opening his eyes. “That was an argument in favour of Thomas committing suicide.”

The words keep passing by, recorded by the whiteboard, and a notebook that Ethan has obtained in order to analyse everyone, in the hopes of being able to stop the exercise for long enough that he can try to explain what he thinks the root causes of everyone’s feelings are.

Remus is grieving. It’s simple as that. Suicidal thoughts can be caused by the death of a loved one, even if you are a caricatured splinter of someone’s single personality, as is your loved one. Virgil is uncertain about the future, and death offers a simple escape from all of those fears. And, Logan? Logan can rationalise anything, if he’s led to believe the truth of it. None of them are perfect at their jobs, after all.

However, Ethan needs to be. He can’t have all of his failures as Deceit weighing on him, like a cartoon villain costume. He’s shed that disguise like an old skin, to reveal a new one that fits what Thomas needs. He has to be Self-Preservation, and he _cannot fail_.

“You’re talking about important things without me.”

Ethan has to do a double-take. He’d never heard Hope sound disappointed until now.

The newest Side has risen up to his right. His arms are folded over his blue-and-white raglan shirt, hiding the emblem on the front. His corduroy trousers, in some shade of mustard, are turned up at the hem, showing off his mismatched, patterned socks.

He adjusts his glasses as he turns and looks at the whiteboard.

“You want to die,” Hope says, flatly. His gaze settles for a moment on each of them, save for Ethan. “Do you?”

Remus and Virgil both nod, though Virgil is hesitant about it. Thomas just shrugs.

“And you have _those_ reasons?”

Thomas nods.

“Logan, are you serious?” asks Hope, incredulous.

The aforementioned Logan gestures at his necktie. “Always.”

“Then how come none of you have realised how stupid this debate is?”

For the past two months or so, Ethan had regarded Hope as little more than a happy accident. The last remaining proof that Thomas can be happy. A blindly naïve inner child that babbles about nothing, and who has all of the puppy-dog cuteness to provide Thomas with occasional serotonin boosts.

He’d never thought that Hope’s eyes could narrow in some strange kind of fury, or that he would be more of an impassioned orator than Ethan himself.

“Death is inevitable, and we all know it. You’re debating on whether or not to speed it up, as if this life isn’t worthwhile,” says Hope. “And I’m telling you, right here, today, that it _is_. You’re ashamed of not living up to how you used to be? Big deal! Everyone changes, and, if you get worse, that just means that you can improve again! Humans suck? Yeah, but we can always start a revolution against the one percent!”

“That doesn’t seem plausible-”

Hope waves a hand and interrupts, “I don’t _care_! Sometimes people are bad, but a lot of times, people can be good. We’re creatures that naturally pack-bond. We exist to love, and to make up for others’ weaknesses with our strengths. We perform! We entertain! If we can’t act, we’ll sing, and if we can’t sing, we’ll write. All of those things are difficult to perfect, but they’re basic human behaviour!”

He gestures wildly, displaying the blue star in the centre of his chest for all to see.

“There’s so many reasons to smile, every single day. It’s nice to eat your favourite foods, and it’s nice to eat different foods, so you can find new favourites, and so your old favourites don’t get boring. It’s nice to tell jokes to your friends, and to make them laugh, and for them to tell you how much you mean to them. It’s really _great_ to pet dogs! Gosh, I just want to pet every dog ever, and we can’t do that if we’re dead. We can’t do anything if we’re dead, and we definitely can’t get better.”

Hope walks up to Remus with longer strides than Ethan expected from him, and extends a hand.

“You’re grieving, Remus. Everyone is, but you most of all. I know it hurts, more than anything. I know there’s no silver lining to losing someone close to you.”

Ethan stifles the change in his expression at Hope’s white lie.

“You have Roman’s job, now. That’s gonna be really hard,” Hope intones. “You’re not who you used to be, anymore. Parts of you are the Remus you were before I existed in this form. Parts of you are from Roman. Remus, Roman _lives on_ , in _you_! You’re our hopes and dreams, now, Remus. I believe in you!”

Ethan watches Thomas, and Virgil, and Logan, all watching Hope wipe a tear from Remus’s eye.

“And, do you know what?”

Hope waits for Remus’s head to tilt in curiosity.

“I bet that Roman believed in you, too.”


End file.
